What BDPA Memphis Built When Nobody Was Keeping Score

The rain came down steady on Day 1. People showed up anyway.

They hugged at the door. Picked up mid-sentence conversations that had been paused since the last meetup. Asked about kids and jobs and side projects before anyone had written a single line of code. That’s where the BDPA Memphis “Dumb Hackathon” actually began: not at a keyboard, but around a table at the FedEx Institute of Technology, where the first thing being built was permission.

Over two days, roughly 25 participants gathered to build something together. Working professionals, students, and first-time hackers in roughly equal measure. The premise was unusual: no problem statements, no judging criteria, no prizes for the most practical solution. The only rule was to make something. Ideally something a little absurd.

The room buzzed before any code was written. Groups clustered organically, not by skill set or strategic alignment, but by idea and energy. Someone floated a slot machine dating app with a Memphis theme. Someone else sketched out a life-size robot costume with help from Midsouth Makers, who had brought tools, materials, and a generous willingness to support whatever strange thing the room might dream up. Experienced developers were intentionally reaching for weird over practical. That choice wasn’t accidental.

BDPA Memphis leadership (Naim Hakeem, Coriano Harris, and Katheryn Hicks) set the tone early. The kickoff was warm and explicit: have fun, let loose, build something silly, be in community. Those weren’t throwaway lines. They were instructions for psychological safety, and the room received them as such. By midday, there was more conversation than building, and that felt exactly right.

What Day 1 produced wasn’t deployable. It was trust. And in a community that has spent two years cultivating the kind of cohesion where a hackathon like this becomes possible, that foundation is the work.

For James Hammett, navigating an entry into tech and looking to encourage fellow CodeCrew students and alumni, it was a room that made the ecosystem feel approachable rather than gatekept. And he found both happened without effort, because the room was designed for exactly that. For Katheryn Hicks and Arlinda Ibezim (one with a startup in motion, one carrying threads back to Epicenter Memphis hackathon), the weekend was proof that a hackathon alumni, a startup founder, and a youth coding program exist in the same relational web here: same people, same trust, same underlying belief that Memphis builds differently.

By Sunday, the weather had shifted. The overcast gave way to a cool, clear afternoon. And the energy inside the FedEx Institute shifted with it: focused, then expressive, then fully alive once the demos began.

Eleven projects. No judges. Audience Q&A instead of scoring rubrics. A raffle prize where a competition bracket would normally sit.

The tone was set early when Albert, a college student, walked through a suite of funny system control apps that had deliberately bad UI and deliberately useless features. The room responded with the kind of laughter that loosens everyone up. Then Coriano Harris presented a self-sabotaging form. It was exactly what it sounds like: a form designed to resist completion, to fight the user at every turn. People played with it all day. It became a running joke, a recurring anchor, a thing people kept returning to between other conversations. That a self-destructing form built in a weekend became the social glue of a hackathon is the kind of outcome that can’t be planned for.

The defining moment came mid-demos when Shivaa and Rahul (first-time hackers, both college students) presented their Brainrot “Gen-Z” Translator. The room gasp was genuine, collective, and immediate. What followed was laughter that didn’t stop, and an engagement that went deeper than entertainment. The crowd leaned in, asked questions, wanted to understand how it worked. The energy wasn’t passive. It was co-creative. For two people who had never built in a hackathon environment before, the response wasn’t just applause. It was confirmation.

Hoangmon, also a first-time hacker, brought a math-based pickleball game that drew the room in through sheer playability. Michael Harris from CodeCrew, a bootcamp graduate stepping into the hackathon format for the first time, built a data automation tool rooted in a real-world application. Scree, a city data analyst new to the hackathon space, presented a data reconciliation tool designed to simplify workflows that had been frustrating her professionally. The connection between lived friction and built solution was immediate and visible.

Naim Hakeem and Tremaine McKiney (an engineer and a data analyst) built a game together about squashing an unkillable bug in under 24 hours. Demonstrating without narrating it that game development doesn’t require a specialized background.

None of these projects was polished. Bugs surfaced. GitHub caused friction for at least one team navigating it for the first time. Most demos were barely functional by conventional standards. Every single one was presented with confidence and received with the same generosity.

The weekend before the Dumb Hackathon, Epicenter Memphis hosted a different kind of event entirely. Eight teams competed for serious cash prizes in front of judges. The problem spaces were ambitious: cybersecurity, environmental activism, a live events marketplace, food waste management, education, and more. It was a high-stakes room, built around performance and prize structure, designed to pressure-test ideas and surface the strongest teams.

That format serves a real purpose. It has produced real outcomes for Memphis founders.

But something different happens in a room without a scoreboard. The Dumb Hackathon wasn’t a reaction to competitive formats. It was a compliment to them. A different kind of infrastructure for a different kind of builder.

When the pressure to win is removed, people stop protecting their ideas. When there are no judging criteria, builders stop calculating which risks are worth taking and start taking all of them. Shivaa and Rahul didn’t build a Brainrot Translator because they thought it would score well. They built it because nothing was stopping them from building exactly what they wanted. The same was true for the self-sabotaging form, the pickleball math game, the mechanical ketchup bottle, and the M-Town Match dating app with its Memphis-specific absurdity.

AI moved quietly through the weekend, available for code generation and ideation, lowering the technical floor enough that first-timers could ship something real in under 24 hours. But the technology wasn’t the story. The culture was.

The room looked like Memphis tech at its most honest: students beside senior engineers, career-switchers presenting next to industry veterans, physical builds sharing floor space with data tools. The laughter wasn’t forced. It emerged from shared experience: the recognition that everyone in the room had chosen to spend a weekend making something they didn’t have to make, in a community that was glad they did.

Memphis now has rooms for both: the competitive stage where ideas get stress-tested, and the low-pressure lab where ideas get permission to exist in the first place. Both are part of how a healthy ecosystem grows.

What BDPA Memphis demonstrated over those two days isn’t easily categorized as a hackathon outcome. There were no winners. There was no deployment. There were eleven demos, hundreds of conversations, and a room full of people who left lighter than they arrived.

The FedEx Institute of Technology has hosted a lot of important Memphis tech moments: GiveCamp Memphis hackathons, community meetings, and early-stage pitch sessions. This weekend added something quieter to that list: a proof of concept for what an ecosystem looks like when it decides that belonging is as important as building. That the best thing you can make on a given weekend might be a room where someone who’s never shipped anything stands up and shows the work anyway, and the people around them make it easy to do that.

BDPA Memphis hosts events like this throughout the year: low-pressure, community-first gatherings designed around the same values that made this weekend work. If this room sounds like one you want to be in, their community is open and worth showing up for.

Every week, new events surface. New partnerships form. New lessons are shared publicly.
Stay connected to what’s actually happening, not just what’s announced.

95+ Issues Published
600+ Events Amplified
250K+ Digital Impressions

See More Community Recaps